Sewage-cleansing device earns Cade Prize

Thursday

A machine designed to address sanitation problems by turning sewage into clean water, energy and fertilizer won the $50,000 Cade Museum Prize on Thursday night, selected by a national panel of judges.

A machine designed to address sanitation problems by turning sewage into clean water, energy and fertilizer won the $50,000 Cade Museum Prize on Thursday night, selected by a national panel of judges.The NEWgenerator machine was invented by Daniel Yeh, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of South Florida, and his team of graduate students.In his four-minute pitch to the nearly 300 people in attendance at the Santa Fe College Fine Arts Hall, Yeh said their invention addresses some of the "grand challenges" faced by the planet, including access to clean water, energy, sanitation and food production.Forty percent of the world's population faces sanitation problems that cause a child's death every 20 seconds, Yeh said."By the time I'm done with this presentation, 12 kids will die," he added.He described how the NEWgenerator uses naturally occurring microbes to break down waste into biogas that can be used to produce energy, nutrients for fertilizer and water that is run through ultrafiltration membranes.With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation, his team has developed the machine from the lab to a pilot project to the field "and now we're hoping that with the Cade Prize we can commercialize the product to launch a company called BioRenew."With the prize, Yeh and his team receive $50,000 from the Community Foundation of North Central Florida and $10,000 in free legal services from Edwards Wildman. The other three finalists will receive $2,500 each in legal services."We're not driven by profit. It is that somebody has to do something to face these grand challenges our planet faces. It might as well be us."The runner-up was Kinwa, a Gainesville company that developed a mobile app called Bubble that allows people to use their smart devices to bring up websites about nearby objects attached with tiny low-energy transmitters called "beacons." The company was founded a year ago by four recent University of Florida graduates.The People's Choice Award, selected by audience vote, went to Ovation Diagnostics, a subsidiary of Impact Medical Strategies of Boca Raton. The company is developing a urine test to detect ovarian cancer.CEO Navroze Mehta said ovarian cancer is typically discovered after it reaches stage 2 or higher, at which point it has a 30 percent survival rate. The urine test can catch the cancer at stage 1 "when the prognosis goes up to 95 percent, so we could save hundreds of thousands of lives by discovering this cancer earlier."The other Final Four finalist was Paracosm of Gainesville, which is developing software to create 3D models. CEO Amir Rubin described the software as "Google Earth for indoors."Rubin said in the coming years the technology will allow people to use their phones to take photos that can be uploaded to the cloud and "coalesced like a jigsaw puzzle" to create 3D models of spaces. The applications can be for human use, such as for a visually impaired person who could download a map of a building and receive auditory instructions, or machine use, such as navigating a telemedicine robot.The prize drew 85 applications from throughout Florida with the Sweet 16 and Final Four paired down by 45 judges.Marty Wynkoop, Cade Museum Foundation board member, said the finalists were judged on innovation: "Was it a small tweak or a big leap?" "How many people would it affect and how much would it help?" And how ready are they to go to market?The theme of the event was the physics of flight. Students who attended the Cade Museum's Living Inventor Series conducted experiments demonstrating the science behind flight in the lobby. The Dance Alive National Ballet performed a dance complete with a wire-flying dancer who swung over the audience as a narrator described the science of flight.David Molyneaux, chairman of the Cade Museum fundraising committee, inducted the first members of the +1Society — 26 people, families or organizations who have contributed a combined $3 million toward a $9 million goal to build the Cade Museum in Depot Park.

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